Songs of Experience

On the crest of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the influential Norman Blake comes to St. Louis for the weekend

Trying to put words to what Norman Blake has meant to American music, one risks entering a maze of analogy and never finding a way out. He is to old-time string music what the Library of Congress is to history; he is to the acoustic guitar what Wassily Kandinsky is to color; he has brought to the tradition of American song what Frank Lloyd Wright brought to the building of homes: the endless possibilities of a clear vision. In every flat-picked note, he is the storyteller that modernity -- with its delight in fragmentation and isolation -- has tried, and failed, to do away with.

Save his stint as a radio operator in the Army, Blake has played traditional country music all his life. But even while stationed on the Panama Canal, he formed a bluegrass band, playing fiddle and mandolin for the troops. He remains an anomalous, almost archaic figure. Like Doc Watson or Tony Rice, the only flat-pickers who could accurately be called his peers, Blake has saved and renewed the beauty of old-time music because it's all he knows or cares to know.

Blake was born March 10, 1938, in Chattanooga, and the Tennessee-Georgia border remains his home. "I live in Rising Fawn, Ga., which is 25 miles south of Chattanooga," he says. "I grew up about three miles from where I live now. Rising Fawn is a very small wide place in the road, on Highway No. 11, the old Lee Highway that ran from New Orleans to the Canadian border. The railroad runs through it, but it's not much of a town, really, just a small country village. We don't even have a supermarket, just a couple of 7-Elevens, a truck stop, a hardware store and a few churches. The only time I haven't been in Dade County, Ga., was about six years when I lived in Nashville and my time during the Army. I don't know if there's any real reason. When you're from someplace and your family has been here a couple hundred years, you just sort of end up there. I'm not saying I'll be stuck here forever, but I imagine I will be."

Donald Kallaus

Norman Blake: He is to old-time string music what the Library of Congress is to history.

Donald Kallaus

Norman Blake: He is to old-time string music what the Library of Congress is to history.

Details

Performs on Friday and Saturday, May 4 and 5.

Focal Point

That rural Southern experience, where time is measured by the changing light and dreams have the sound of a slow train that never stops in your town, suffuses Blake's music. He titled one album Original Underground Music from the Mysterious South, an indication that, for Blake, the sound of a guitar and mandolin winding their way through a tune of unknown history and origin somehow lies at the heart of the enigma that is rural America. And the more secret the tune, the better. "I get these songs from any source I can," he says. "I heard so much country music as a child, and I had snatches and remnants running around my head for years. I've pieced them together over the years. I've worked around to find the complete versions of songs I remember. I work out of old phonograph records, old hillbilly 78's. I like 78-rpm records, the prewar recordings. I still get out, as we refer to it, and junk some for records. They're artifacts of the 20th century."

Few acoustic-guitar players have been more highly regarded or more frequently requested for session work than Blake; along with Watson, he helped established the instrument as a melodic, rather than purely rhythmic, voice in country music. He appeared on Dylan's Nashville Skyline, as well as on seminal recordings by David Bromberg, John Hartford, Kris Kristofferson, Rice and Johnny Cash. "Those people were fairly radical in their thinking and sort of on the periphery themselves," Blake says. "They were looking for people to play music which was in a traditional mode in some ways but was also creative and exploratory. They were looking for new things, but within a traditional framework. Though I'm a very traditional musician, I've also been an experimental musician."

In a worldview dominated by a rock & roll perspective, tradition and experimentation have long been viewed as opposing tendencies. The formula is neat and pernicious: Traditionalists are conservative and unimaginative; experimentalists are progressive and visionary. And yet, without an understanding of musical history, experiments rarely result in more than passing fads; without innovation, a tradition could never exist. Because he works within traditional idioms, the imaginative freedom of his playing and the infinitesimal subtleties of his melodic vision are all the more striking.

Though Blake is best known for his guitar playing, he is skilled, and often riveting, on the mandolin, fiddle and banjo. But what's most often overlooked is his songwriting. His lyrical gifts reflect the same seamless marriage of tradition and individual talent he brings to his musicianship. If the credits to such songs as "Last Train from Poor Valley," "Church Street Blues" and, especially, "Billy Gray" did not bear his name, you would imagine his songs had been with us forever.